1. The Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer software and, more particularly, to novel systems and methods for organizing and retrieving objects such as digital photographs, images, audio recordings, video recordings, or other files stored in databases.
2. The Background Art
The emergence and proliferation of electronic devices, such as digital cameras, video recorders, music players, and other computing devices, has made the storage of digital images, as well as other forms of digital video, audio, files, and the like, more common, inexpensive, and convenient. Due to the decreased expense and increased convenience, a user may acquire these types of media and files more easily and in increased numbers. With these increased numbers, means of organizing and cataloging the media in a manner that the media may be effectively catalogued, classified, searched, associated, and retrieved is an important issue.
Digital media organizers, albums, and the like, typically lack the power to effectively store, catalog, associate, and search vast numbers of media files or other files. Moreover, many include user interfaces that are nonintuitive, lack intuitive methods to organize the media, and do not provide a user the ability to easily configure and personalize the interface.
What is needed is an intuitive, easy to use, powerful database system to effectively catalog, store, associate, search, and retrieve digital media and files so that they are readily accessible and easily manipulated by an unsophisticated user.
What is further needed is a method to arbitrarily classify and associate photographs with key words and phrases that may be selected and personalized by a user on the fly, on any “soft” or hard basis (e.g., logic), thereby providing the features and advantages of an associative database and yet of a pseudo “artificial intelligence” or “fuzzy logic” connection scheme (e.g. association). Moreover, what is further needed is a powerful search engine which may quickly locate photographs according to pre-defined search parameters corresponding to the keys words and phrases previously selected obtaining the benefit of highly deterministic systems, yet benefitting from the highly developed, inherent, “fuzzy logic” types of associations available to a user by virtue of the normal operation of the human brain.